


A Little Faith

by renawitch



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman Friendship, Catholic Guilt, Confused Nile Freeman, Crusades, Difficult Decisions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Exiled Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Grief/Mourning, Memories, Nicky was a badass once, Showers, The monster inside
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:26:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28338429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renawitch/pseuds/renawitch
Summary: He looked as if he had shrunk quite a bit, collapsed into himself, lost all body tension and bitter tears stood in his eyes."You know," she realised incredulously. "You know how he feels because you've done unforgivable things yourself."Nicky looked up, gave a whimpering sigh and nodded dejectedly."As I said, we all live with the abysses within us. I have been struggling for more than nine hundred years with the demons I conjured up during the crusade. The deaths Joe gave me were just, fitting and more than deserved but they do not erase the guilt I brought upon myself. It's with me to this day and Booker won't be able to get rid of it either."
Kudos: 19





	A Little Faith

**Author's Note:**

> As always, the warning beforehand: English is not my mother tongue and I hope that this text is still okay for you.  
> Of course, I am very happy to receive feedback. It can only help me to improve.

Dark bags piled up in the living room. They had already packed almost everything that did not have to stay in the safehouse. Today was their last day in the south of England and their flights would leave in the late afternoon.  
Actually, they all just wanted to get away from London, from Merrick Pharmaceuticals, the bad events of the last few days and this damned island as quickly as possible.  
Joe and Nicky were almost on their way towards Malta. Andy would fly with Nile to Greece for a while and then go to some European cities. 

The water from the shower in the bathroom of the safehouse had been rushing for what felt like an eternity.  
While Joe and Andy were running last-minute errands, Nile waited for Nicky to finally clear the shower, but he took his sweet time that morning and made no effort to leave the bathroom. When Nile had impatiently knocked on the door some time ago, he had only made a humming noise, but otherwise did not respond in any way to her urging.  
It had been a while since that advance and slowly but surely resentment and worry were spreading through Nile. Gnawing her lower lip, she rose from her place on the sofa and after a few steps stood once more in front of the bathroom door.  
The water continued to rush with undiminished intensity. Reluctantly, she raised an eyebrow and knocked hesitantly.  
She received no response. Perhaps he had not heard her? She knocked louder now, more insistently.  
"Nicky? How long are you going to stay in there?"  
He didn't answer. Sceptically, she drew her eyebrows together, banged loudly against the wood one more time.  
"Nicky? Are you okay?"  
Except for the sound of rushing water, an oppressive silence struck her.  
Something wasn't right after all! Nile took a deep breath, pushed down the handle and stepped into the bathroom.

When the door opened, a wall of damp, hot steam hit her. The air in the small room was cuttingly thick and blisteringly warm.  
The vapour appeared so thick that it even limited visibility inside the room, but Nicky's distorted silhouette stood upright, yet motionless, behind the frosted glass of the shower.  
Nile raised her eyebrows questioningly, the shower water beating down on Nicky had to be incredibly hot to create so much haze and heat in the room.  
She approached the shower cubicle, tapping hesitantly on the glass.  
"Um, Nicky," she brought out uncertainly. "Are you all right? I'm starting to get worried. You'll end up drowning in here or accidentally boiling yourself as hot as your shower water is."  
The glass cubicle opened a crack after a while and Nicky peered out of it with a serious expression.  
"It's all right, Nile, I'm done. Will you pass me a towel please?"  
A few moments later Nicky stepped silently out of the shower cubicle, the towel wrapped loosely around his hips.  
Nile eyed his flushed skin critically and drew his eyebrows together sceptically.  
He gave her a warm smile and subsequently did his best to ignore her while he brushed his teeth, but she did not take her scrutinising gaze from him and leaned silently against the doorframe.  
After a few moments Nicky paused and turned to her with a questioning expression on his face.  
"When Joe gets back, we'll have to explain to him why you're still standing in the doorway staring at me while I'm dressed only in a towel."  
The words left her lips without her giving them any further thought.  
"Nicky, there's something wrong with you."  
There it was again, that quiet, shy, timid laugh that he so often put on when the right words didn't come to him at the drop of a hat. He shook his head in denial and didn't answer her.  
"You spent almost an hour in the shower and the water was so damn hot your body looks like you got a full-blown sunburn."  
"Tutto bene, Nile," he replied quietly, but left the bathroom without giving her another glance and hurriedly pushed past her.  
"It's all good. Really."

She paused inside the bathroom for a moment and then followed him into the living room, gnawing on her lower lip.  
He had carelessly dropped the towel on the floor, put on his shorts and was buttoning the button of his black jeans while looking searchingly for a T-shirt.  
She stepped close to him again, hesitated for a moment and finally put a hand on his right shoulder. He flinched briefly under her touch and froze before dropping resignedly onto the sofa.  
"Nicky, don't give me that crap. I can see something's bothering you"  
"You're right," he sighed resignedly. "Quite a lot has happened in the last few days. I'm just a little overloaded, I guess."  
Nile raised an eyebrow questioningly and dropped into an armchair opposite him.  
"Have you talked to Joe ... I mean, do you want to talk about it?" She pushed a glass towards him and filled it with mineral water from the bottle that sat beside the tablet on the table between them.  
Nicky took a deep breath but kept silent, glum.  
Only after he had half emptied the glass did he regain his speech. Nile noticed that his melodic Italian accent came out more clearly than was usually the case with him.  
"Most of it Joe and I talked about last night, but there are some things I don't want to burden him with just yet. It's not yet ...," he struggled for English words, which he occasionally lacked when he was in thought, and lapsed unceremoniously into Italian, "... il momento giusto."  
Nile nodded in understanding, though she wasn't clear exactly what he was getting at.  
She suspected that Nicky and Joe had spent the previous night discussing what must have been their horrible experiences in Merrick's lab. It would certainly take some time for both of them to come to terms with these experiences, but this did not seem to be the only reason for Nicky's tension.

He visibly struggled with himself, huddled tensely on the sofa and involuntarily played with the fabric of the T-shirt he had found on the armrest.  
Nicky stared into space for a moment and sighed wistfully.  
"Non so se è la decisione giusta..."  
Nile pursed his lips in concern as he whispered the words more to himself than they seemed intended for her ears. She was practising Italian, but her efforts were still in their infancy and she could only guess, without having to ask Nicky, that he was whispering something about decisions he didn't seem to approve of.  
Pensively, Nicky looked up and noticed her irritated expression.  
"It's Booker," he whispered dejectedly. "I agreed to his banishment, but I'm still having a hard time with it."  
She was still looking at him confused, not understanding what he was trying to tell her.  
"There is a deep abyss yawning inside each of us, Nile, and we all have to face our own mistakes and choices every day. I live every day knowing that I was once someone I would rather not think about today, but Booker has just begun the battle with his own demons. I'm afraid he won't be able to defeat them entirely without our help."

Nile nodded mildly, but felt a faint trace of anger flare up inside her.  
She had stood up for Booker, had even made a flaming plea for him, but she was "the new girl". She had the right to vote on the sentence, but had been outvoted by all the other team members.  
Joe's anger burned so brightly and glaringly that he considered the one hundred years of banishment they finally agreed on far too light a punishment.  
That it ultimately became only this one century, Booker owed to Nicky's resigned leniency and a touch of rarely occurring sentimentality and a hint of pity in Andromache.  
Nevertheless, Nile was now biting her lower lip to hold back the underlying reproach that was on the tip of her tongue.  
If Nicky had spoken more vehemently in favour of a lesser sentence, Booker's years of banishment might have been some time shorter.  
Instead of making an angry accusation, Nile forced herself to see Booker's betrayal through Joe's and Nicky's eyes. 

He had lured them into a trap, betrayed them, sold them to Merrick and handed them over. Played Joe and Nicky into Merrick's hands, exposed them to captivity, torture and multiple deaths.  
It was hard for her to look at it from that point of view, but that the Guard felt betrayed, betrayed and deeply hurt was something she could well understand.  
On the other side was Booker.  
Booker, who had never wanted to be a soldier and yet had been forced into it again and again against his will. Even before his first death, nothing was further from his mind than to go into battles that were not even his own. For him, however, there had only ever been a choice between eat or die. Fight or lose your own life. My way or higway.  
What was his alternative to the Guard? An immortal life completely alone. With no friends, no family, no solid bonds, no regular routines, full of grief, anger and alcohol. A life they had condemned him to by the exile they had decided on. For the next hundred years.  
The anger flared up inside her again and Nicky instantly noticed that something had changed in her posture, expression and mood.

Nicky fixed her with a hard, unyielding stare.  
"You hoped I would save him, didn't you? You thought I'd stand up for him more than I did."  
She fell silent. Stared convulsively for a moment at the tablet lying on the tabletop between them so Nicky wouldn't see how damn right he was in making that assumption. Nile clenched her jaw and didn't look at him even when Nicky spoke again after a while. The undertone in his usually gentle voice seemed strangely harsh, unyielding and alien to her.  
"I'm not the white knight in shining armour you might think I am, Nile. I wasn't then and I'm not now."

She gave a laugh that was anything but amused, turned to him and had almost spoken the sentence when she froze in mid-word.  
"But for Joe, wouldn't anything ..."  
The serious, almost cold, look he gave her silenced her immediately.  
Not a hint of humour was on his features and as he tilted his head, Nile thought she could read a certain hardness in the blue eyes that she had never seen on Nicky like that before.  
"It took more than two hundred years to get to that point. Before that, there was a time when I did things to him that..."  
His voice failed. He broke off in mid-sentence and took a deep breath.  
"I am far from being just the good person you might think I am at first glance. I understand very well that Booker was looking for a way out for himself. He's still so young and he's lost so much. It's not that Joe, Andy or myself haven't desperately tried that too, but never, never at the expense of the team. There are wrong decisions, questionable motivations and a few things for us ...," his voice lowered to a low whisper, "... that are just unforgivable."

Nile eyed his scowl questioningly and only after a few moments did she realise there was a certain pain in his eyes that she hadn't noticed before. Sure, Nicky felt betrayed and cheated. The disappointment sat deep like a thorn in his flesh but clearly there was more.  
She rose from the chair and in a few long strides was beside him. Slowly she took a seat next to him on the sofa, turned directly to him and fixed him with her gaze.  
He looked as if he had shrunk quite a bit, collapsed into himself, lost all body tension and bitter tears stood in his eyes.  
"You know," she realised incredulously. "You know how he feels because you've done unforgivable things yourself."  
Nicky looked up, gave a whimpering sigh and nodded dejectedly.  
"As I said, we all live with the abysses within us. I have been struggling for more than nine hundred years with the demons I conjured up during the crusade. The deaths Joe gave me were just, fitting and more than deserved but they do not erase the guilt I brought upon myself. It's with me to this day and Booker won't be able to get rid of it either."  
Nile hardly knew what to say. She understood what Nicky was trying to say, yet, or perhaps because of it, it didn't make sense to her why he hadn't stood up for Booker more.  
"You know Booker is struggling with the knowledge of the consequences for you, that he is honestly and immensely sorry. He won't get through the exile without our help. Not without it destroying him."  
Nicky shook his head in unison.  
"It took Joe and me almost thirty years before there was even a faint qualm about killing the other. Until something like trust could grow, decades more. Without the help of Andy and Quynh..." he shook his head again. "There's always a price..."  
Nile stared at him in silence and disbelief. She lacked the appropriate words to express her disbelief.  
Nicky noticed her doubt immediately and smiled mirthlessly.  
"Nile, the monster I once was had to be destroyed before it could become the man you know today. Yet it is still deep inside me and will never leave me. Booker will do that."  
He placed the tablet in her hand, which lay on the tabletop, and stroked the screen with his index finger. A picture of a living room appeared. A few bottles were clearly visible on the table and the man slumped in the armchair put another straight to his lips to take a sip.  
"He's not really as alone as he thinks he is right now. You and I will keep an eye on him and maybe it won't even take the hundred years."  
Wistfully, Nile stroked the display and zoomed in on the detail that showed Booker himself. He looked terrible. Torn down, distraught and utterly drunk, while tears wet his cheeks and the camera's microphone transmitted his stifled sobs.  
Nile swallowed dejectedly and Nicky grabbed her hand to place it comfortingly in his.  
"Nile," he repeated again, "Booker will be fine. Just have a little faith."


End file.
